When I was in my 20s I was an insufferable know-it-all who found fault with everything.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
I remember ridiculing "cloud computing" by calling it "clown computing" decades ago. It's pretty old and well established snark-jargon, like spelling Micro$oft with a dollar sign.
I’ll express my personal preference for VS Code with Cline. I don’t know exactly why, but its workflow feels right even though they’re all almost the same interface. I do like the huge choice of models and payment options. For something I use burstily, it makes sense for me to pay as I go.
I enjoy reading about other people’s approaches to motivation and creativity.
But I very much dislike when they phase it as “you need to” or “this is how it works”. Thinking everyone else’s brain operates the way yours does seems to be a frequent bias among bloggers. And managers.
I encourage those who write about their experiences to keep it in the first person.
> I encourage those who write about their experiences to keep it in the first person.
My therapist gave me this exact criticism our first few sessions. On a more charitable read, writing is as much an exercise for the author as it is for the reader. That you might be the writer talking out loud to themselves, not to you in particular.
In any case, point taken. I will keep that in mind, even though I really would like my writing to have a more assertive tone. There are times one seeks to be told what to do, what to try, rather than having to suffer the tired cliché that "this advice might apply to you, it might not, only you know best."
Not only that. My brain operate differently at different times. I may find that an approach that works for me now doesn't work in a year. It doesn't mean the approach is "wrong" or that I was wrong choosing it a year ago. Maybe it was the right approach for that time, and now I have different needs.
I strongly agree, I find it a sign of a mature writer when they write in the first person about such topics. It's based on reflection that personal truths are subjective and it's better to be more accurate (that these are the individual's experiences and learnings), rather than prescriptive (that these are Universal truths and everyone should fall in line).
I found a tiny bug in a library. A single, trivial, “the docs say this utility function does X, but it actually does Y”. I’m not even allowed to file a bug report. It took me some time to figure out how to even ask for permission, and they referred it to some committee where it’s in limbo.
I have to resist the urge to tile every surface with blinky lights. I think part of the appeal goes back to why I enjoyed writing programs on my C64 to bounce my name around the screen. It’s a limited playground, and limitations inspire creativity.
On rare occasions, I use it for the virtual display; it's actually usable to sit outside and work with a giant display on the deck, or to dial myself onto the beach. But it's not exactly comfortable for extended use, and most of the time I'd rather sit at my nice desktop with multiple monitors etc.
I also have a Quest 3 and if I could only own one device, I'd take the Q3 hands-down. The games are fun, they get you up and moving, and although I'm not going to argue that the quality of the screens is the same or anything, it's more than good enough. I'll happily give up the virtual laptop screen in exchange for the library of VR games on the Quest.
I'm not much for consuming media so that aspect is lost on me. Unfortunately, that seems to be the primary use case Apple has focused on, if you can call the anemic dribble of content they've put out focus.
I've been using Clerk and it seems fine. I'm sure there's some drama, because everything comes with drama, but I just want to get on with building stuff.
Sometimes I spend half an hour writing a prompt and realize that I’ve basically rubber-ducked the problem to the point where I know exactly what I want, so I just write the code myself.
I have been doing my best to give these tools a fair shake, because I want to have an informed opinion (and certainly some fear of being left behind). I find that their utility in a given area is inversely proportional to my skill level. I have rewritten or fixed most of the backend business logic that AI spits out. Even if it’s mostly ok on a first pass, I’ve been doing this gig for decades now and I am pretty good at spotting future technical debt.
On the other hand, I’m consistently impressed by its ability to save me time with UI code. Or maybe it’s not that it saves me time, but it gets me to do more ambitious things. I’d typically just throw stuff on the page with the excuse that I’m not a designer, and hope that eventually I can bring in someone else to make it look better. Now I can tell the robot I want to have drag and drop here and autocomplete there, and a share to flooberflop button, and it’ll do enough of the implementation that even if I have to fix it up, I’m not as intimidated to start.
I've had the Corporate Approved CoPilot + Sonnet 4 write a full working React page for me based on a screenshot of a Figma model. (Not even through an MCP)
It even discovered that we have some internal components and used them for it.
Got me from 0-MVP in less then an hour. Would've easily taken me a full day
I don’t know if this counts as experienced, but I’ve spent about a year exploring Next.js, the last 6 months of which transitioning from exploring to building a serious project.
I understand the author’s frustrations. I have had similar ones when it comes to middleware and other parts of Next.js. I’ve also had those kinds of frustrations with every piece of software and framework I’ve ever used. A lot of times they stem from trying to shove a square peg into a round hole, and it only gets better when I finally develop the right mental model for how the thing works.
As a web developer going back to CGI scripts in the 90s, all this server and client side rendering, edge runtimes, etc., is quite foreign. But when I find myself screaming “why won’t it let me do this?”, the answer is often “because it doesn’t make sense to do that”. Auth is one of the places where that happened, and going through the process of “but why can’t I look the user up in my database from middleware” was a big part of wrapping my head around the parts of Next.js that I had been ignoring.
As far as being married to Vercel for hosting, not at all, if you don’t choose to use all their stuff. The sample Docker build they have works just fine to deploy anywhere, in my experience.
Maybe I’m speaking mostly out of ignorance of not having tried dozens of other modern TS web frameworks (I was on a big tech island for a decade and not in touch with what the cool kids were up to), but I rather like Next.js. I may feel differently when I want to start adding native mobile apps and realize I was lulled into omitting a clean API layer, but for now, adding features has been pretty smooth.
I still spot problems and “push back”, but I have the experience now to know how to get people to listen and not just write me off as an annoying prima donna.
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